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Baldrson writes "The Guardian reports that a massive geoengineering project has been detected off the west coast of Canada that violates UN regulations. An Amerindian tribe in the Pacific NW that depends on salmon teamed with an entrepreneur and a group of scientists to have 100 tons of iron sulphate spread across a huge area of the ocean in order to spur plankton growth. 'Satellite images appear to confirm the claim ... that the iron has spawned an artificial plankton bloom as large as 10,000 square kilometers. The intention is for the plankton to absorb carbon dioxide and then sink to the ocean bed – a geoengineering technique known as ocean fertilization that he hopes will net lucrative carbon credits.' The entrepreneur, Russ George, hopes to cash in on the carbon credits and the Amerindian tribe on an increased salmon harvest. The situation has sparked outcry from environmentalists and civil society groups. Oceanographer John Cullen said, 'It is difficult if not impossible to detect and describe important effects that we know might occur months or years later. Some possible effects, such as deep-water oxygen depletion and alteration of distant food webs, should rule out ocean manipulation. History is full of examples of ecological manipulations that backfired.'"

In Canada, the Aboriginal peoples (or "natives") who are not Inuit or Métis are termed "First Nations". In Canadian French, the three groups collectively are "autochtones", and the First Nations are "Premières nations".

See the third paragraph of http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/articles/indian (and in the French version).

Amerindian is just wrong, and especially wrong when referring to this group.

A 1995 Census Bureau survey asked indigenous Americans and found that 49% preferred the term "Indian", 37% "Native American", and 3.6% "some other name." About 5 percent expressed no preference.

Moreover, a large number of Indians actually strongly object to the term Native American for political reasons. In his 1998 essay "I Am An American Indian, Not a Native American!", Russell Means, a Lakota activist and a founder of the American Indian Movement (AIM), stated unequivocally, "I abhor the term 'Native American...At an international conference of Indians from the Americas held in Geneva, Switzerland, at the United Nations in 1977 we unanimously decided we would go under the term American Indian. We were enslaved as American Indians, we were colonized as American Indians, and we will gain our freedom as American Indians and then we can call ourselves anything we damn please."

Sarcasm aside, its an interesting belief in the US that this is true. However, the megafauna and original growth forests of North American that were devastated over ten thousand years by the original humans living here tell a different story.

Human beings, no matter when or where they're from, tend to make a giant mess of the environment. (To be fair, all life will do that -- we just happen to be pretty good at it. The Crown of Thorn starfish is doing a better job killing the Great Barrier Reef (which it dep

They also always want everyone else to undergo population declines but never have the guts to say who and how.

I believe the traditional answer is that as birth rates tend to decline with birth control and lower poverty, we pursue those as best we're able. It's not as satisfying as saying people you don't like are too cowardly to admit they want genocide, but them's the breaks.

A "sustainable" planet is going to require a lot more effort than simply "population decline". If humanity can get together and decide that we have to have a sustainable planet ecology, we need to have maybe 500 million people at the most. 200 is probably more realistic. At that level dumping our own waste products will have a chance to naturally be processed and not be a hazard. With 6 billion people we will be drowning in our own wastes unless we "do something" about the problem and even the US and We

Your apparently random guess of a maximum of 500 million only applies if we take a completely laissez-faire approach to environmental regulation. If we maintain even the fairly lax standards that we have right now in the United States the earth can sustainably support two billion people in a lifestyle similar to that of the average American. The earth can support considerably more if we're willing to put up with stronger environmental regulation and/or a less decadent lifestyle. (A whole lot more if we stop wasting so much - twenty billion people in a lifestyle similar to the average Mexican.)

Aside from the difference in numbers, I can't say that I care for your conclusion. It's taken a hundred years to go from a population of two billion to a population of seven billion, it would be pretty naive to think that we could solve the problem in less time. But given a daunting task, your solution of throwing up our hands and waiting for Technology From The Future to save us is pretty ridiculous. And ridiculing people who haven't given up like you have? That's offensive.

Sustainability will be accomplished at some point whether we get there by taking action ourselves or nature forces it on us. There is not other choice. Technology may put off the day of reckoning but it won't prevent it from happening if population continues to rise.

No, you goddamn moron - the buzzkills are the people who think that engineering changes on a global scale without a fucking clue of the long-term ramifications is a huge, terrible and deadly idea. Heck, even simple projects like damming a river is creating all kinds of unforeseen problems if the damming is large enough: earthquakes, for one, weren't on the list when people drew up drawbacks for those.

Let me guess - you are the fucking idiot who thinks that applying changes directly to production is a brilliant way to speed up the roll-out of new features, don't you?

Oh, and since you're probably one of those people who think that property rights are everything, and the defense of your own way of life trumps everything: mind if I stop by and shoot you in the face because you support fucking up my life through planetary engineering? No? O course not - those solution are only valid if YOUR life is inconvenienced.

Go die in a fire.

You know, your point itself is rather sound. I completely agree that people need to try and figure out what the effects of such projects will be BEFORE they start them. But the fact that you decided to fly off the handle into a profanity-laden tirade wipes out a good chuck of whatever credibility you may have had. Initiating personal attacks on the poster because you disagree with them eliminates the rest. In so doing, you have just demonstrated why so many people are turned off by environmentalists. The subsection that thinks and acts like yourself, i.e. stomping your feet, screaming, swearing, and berating others who don't share your opinion - THAT is how most people see the "green" movement, because people like you are the ones most often heard. When you act like a child in supporting a cause, then human nature sees that the entire thing is seen as petulant, childish, and immature.

Disagree, by all means. That's your right, and I welcome you to exercise it. But in disagreeing, try to use facts, studies, and evidence to support your position instead of further cementing the other side's view of environmentalists. Otherwise, you're not doing yourself or the environment any favors. And before you say anything about the original poster's attitude, realize that an ill informed and snarky comment doesn't always warrant one in return, and certainly not escalated to the level you just reached. Two wrongs, etc. etc.

But I don't expect this to sink in. I'll probably get a profanity-filled wish for my own death before the end of the evening. I've come to expect it when arguing with your type. Want to really shut me up on that? Prove me wrong...

The treaties do not say what you think they do. There is a voluntary moratorium in place that might be violated by the experiment, but there are no national laws and no true enforceable bans in place yet. And the groups opposing it are of the kind that want environmental protection at all cost, and if that means we have to get rid of half the people in the world because we can't feed them without chemical fertilizers, tough luck for them. So I will wait for some more balanced report, maybe even hard scie

US Courts won't charge you with violating the London Convention, but they will nail you for the Marine Protection, Research, and Sanctuaries Act of 1972, which we passed as part of implementing the London Convention.

I assume the Canadians have passed similar laws, but I can't tell you the exact names.

So what happens if this little adventure is actually successful. Obviously there will be some side effects, but what if none of them are negative and the fish flourish and the evil carbon is inprisioned? Will they still seek to crucify this guy? Further, what "teeth" does an international "resolution" have to take legal action against him? he didn't break any actual laws.

It seems like he is swimming in a big grey sea and knows it. And is willing as an entrepreneur to take the risks associated with that swim. Makes sense to me.

If the venture is successful it will be repeated. Just not by this guy.

As for the possible consequences of his actions, that really depends on the exact laws Canada adopted when it signed these UN Conventions. Fines are a definite possibility. Getting carbon credits is not, because you don't get carbon credits for breaking the law. Otherwise you'd be able to get money for firebombing your neighbor's SUV.

It's entirely possible this guy could go to prison for fraud, because he told the local Haida that a) this was totally legal, and b) there was no chance of environmental harm. Neither are true, and given that this guy has been banned from Peru and Spain for doing this exact thing before he can;t very well claim he didn't know.

What if there are unintended consequences? The reason for not allowing Geo Engineering is that you can set off an uncontrollable self feeding cycle. What if what he's doing sets off a cycle that prevents Global Warming and triggers an Ice Age instead? You really should figure out what the possible consequences are before you do something on a global scale. Which normally means more research. If you could stop a Hurricane from hitting Florida but as a consequence Mexico has a drought do you stop the Hurricane?

I really find something I can link to so I don't have to type this out every time...

The ice age predicted in the seventies was supposed to be as a result of sulphur in the atmosphere. It has the opposite effect of carbon in that it bounces energy back out to space. Stopping sulphur getting to the atmosphere is easy, a scrubber on your exhaust stack and most of it is eleiminated. As an added bonus you can sell the sulfuric acid it produces.

Global warming is from carbon in the atmosphere. Trying to get it out is a lot more of a hassle as you'd have to change the whole way you do things. People don't like change, which is why we're seeing so much more of a fight over global warming.

While fiddling with the earth is always questionable, none of this seems worse than what people do on the land everyday. In fact, what with forest clearing and so on, it probably makes this little exercise pale in comparison.

Trouble is, I don't know, and I haven't seen any studies that support or refute the claim.

In the absence of evidence, isn't it prudent to follow Hippocrates, and do no harm?

If this were intended as a practical experiment, there should be some method of collecting data built in, like how much CO2 is sequestered over time, but that doesn't appear to be the case, and some effects won't be measurable for many years.

If it works, he gets to profit from it.If it doesn't work, he walks away with the money given to him by the locals.If it causes issues, he can wash his hands and let the government take care of the fallout.

I'm sorry, but that's not what I call taking risks, it's exploitation. He's gambling the ecosystem for profit.

Can I sit this rod of plutonium next to your bed for the rest of week, just to test my theory that you may gain some super powers? No? Then why the fuck do you support something as untested as wholesale changes to global ecosystems, where we know a good chunk of the negative effects, and really aren't sure if the downsides outweigh the upsides? I'm going to guess because you have no idea how the downsides could possibly directly affect you.

Insofar as realistic-scale research on any geoengineering processes are never going to be allowed, maybe this kinds of illegal stuff is the only way to find out what works and what won't. As the writeup correctly said, we just don't know what kind of effect this will have on oceanic oxygen levels. And for another thing, we don't really know what effect this will have on the salmon either. One thing that I'm happy about: Now we're at least about to find out! Since somebody did this, I hope that a flock of oceanologists flock to the site and measure the shit out of it. Yeah, it's not an experiment we wanted or approve of, but we might as well make a bit of lemonade out of these lemons!

Good point. However, what if the data unequivocally points to a large-scale and irreversible (at least on any scale that humans care about) negative change? Can we impose a sentence that is even remotely on the same scale as the crime?

This is a situation where you carefully ramp up your testing, and not just blow shit sky-high, just to see what happens.

So spewing billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere is NOT against UN regulations? That, it seems to me, is the REAL geoengineering experiment. At least the fertilization team is going to learn something that might be useful.

"Some possible effects, such as deep-water oxygen depletion and alteration of distant food webs, should rule out ocean manipulation"
"Possible effects" should "rule out".. very absolutist. Lets forget the fact that those "possible effects" may be imaginary, or even beneficial. Can't have any ocean manipulation, ever! its "ruled out!"

This isn't exactly total guesswork. I live by the Baltic Sea, which for a long time has been over-fertilized by sewage treatment plants and agriculture in the surrounding countries, and vast areas of its bottom is today completely void of life due to oxygen depletion. I'm suspecting that by "possible" he means we have don't (yet) have any empirical evidence that it would also happen in that area of the ocean.

The UN’s convention on biological diversity (CBD), and the UN’s convention on biological diversity (CBD) and London convention on the dumping of wastes at sea.

Canada is party to both agreements. The US is party to the London Convention. Russ George is an American, his company is American, and they were working for the Haida (a Canadian Aboriginal group) so they are in legal trouble if the Canadian Courts find either applies, or US Courts find the London Convention applies. The specific US Law he

Canada is party to both agreements. The US is party to the London Convention. Russ George is an American, his company is American, and they were working for the Haida (a Canadian Aboriginal group) so they are in legal trouble if the Canadian Courts find either applies

More accurately, they _might_ be in trouble if Canadian Courts find that either applies. It'll then depend on the ongoing mess of sovereignty issues with the Council of the Haida Nations--the Haida never signed any treaties with the Canadian g

If the Haida are sovereign then they are the ones who decide what their law is. They are apparently pretty pissed at Mr. George for telling them this was a great idea that everyone would love, when (in fact) it was a very risky idea that many people hated. If nothing else it's not hard to send a lawyer to the Federal Courthouse with a piece of paper that says "While we retain the right to assert our sovereignty in future cases of this nature, in this case we ask the Cour

You have to be careful about doing things in International waters that violate international law. It SEEMS like you're home free until all the countries in the area decide to bar you from their territorial waters and ports. Or some bodies navy decides you qualify as a pirate.

This is the kind of problem that's created by adversarial politics, we almost always end up choosing a single bad guy to blame all the ills in the world on, but in the end, it's a systemic issue that creates these problems. We'll never find a metric that tells us what is right and wrong to do with regards to the environment, and any solution that seems to offer such a measurement is disingenuous at best.

Which is to say... before the government got involved, there was no market which dealt with carbon sequestration. Before the government got involved the market thought it was a great thing to significantly shift the chemistry of our atmosphere by burning lots of crap and dumping it in the air for everyone to breath.

What? Did you expect Goldman Sachs to just go away after screwing the economy (housing bubble, oil futures, rigged bailout). This is their next chance to take the US tax payers for big buck (Cap-n-Trade is basically a way for Goldman to tax polluters with the money going to them instead of the public coffers).

What? Did you expect Goldman Sachs to just go away after screwing the economy (housing bubble, oil futures, rigged bailout).

I expect that at some point we might learn that the government distortions of markets is not something to be done so willy-nilly, regardless of the 'good intentions' its sold to us with. That housing bubble was also built on the good government intentions to help people at the very edge of affordable home ownership. The collapse was predicted years in advance, but the only members of government that recognized and wanted to do anything about it were shut out, such as Ron Paul in 2001 [youtube.com]

Well, no, that's not going to happen, if for no other reason than exactly the same economists who screwed up the first time are the same ones being asked how to fix the problem. Shame programming doesn't work that way: http://search.dilbert.com/comic/10%20Dollars%20Bug%20Fix [dilbert.com]

The important thing is that we live in a world where "rogue geoengineer" is a profession. I assume he's got an icecave where dude hangs out with Julian Assange and the rest of the League of Gray-hat Supervillians.

oxygen production. plankton are the foundation of the ocean ecosystem. i'm a lefty, but this seems like a win win. change will happen. but no more than when we make hydroelectric dams that drastically change the water temperature so all of the indigenous fish die and have to be replaced with colder water species. and these types of changes are justified every day. I really don't see a problem with this. let's do a study to see what happens when we offer fish more food. you get more fish.

since everyone is already bashing liberals and government regulations, let's look at it from the other side.

what's the libertarian take on this, or, hypothetically, any project where the risks are in the $billions (ignoring effects on human life and welfare)? if things go wrong, then even if this guy goes into a private debtor's prison for life and somehow works at maximum capacity, there would be practically zero chance of him taking full responsibility for his harm. but the state shouldn't be able to stop him preemptively, so what's the deal? how will the open market take care of this (assuming for the moment that he has property licensed the property rights he needs to execute this project).

i guess he could take an insurance policy in theory, but even if an insurer were willing to cover this, the premium if correctly computed would probably be more than he could afford, so he would just go ahead and do it anyway.

what would happen in the real world is, of course, that private interests would have this guy arrested and maybe worse. but that's initiation of force (and libertarians would have to admit that private prisons would still exist in their paradise), so how do you solve the problem without initiating force?

you could say that the entrepreneur is "initiating force" by doing something very risky, but that's a definition which would admit many of the government regulations we have today.

Seriously: there is nothing the UN can do about actions undertaken by private parties. They don't have any police force, much less an army. Now, if the actions violated Canadian law, that might be something that Mr. George actually has to worry about. But violating a resolution of the UN has no more effect than violating a resolution of your local university faculty senate. They are a talking shop, nothing more.

How do you earn carbon credits by dumping iron sulphate in the ocean?.
I find it hard to believe you'd get the by doing something against the rules.
Can I claim carbon credits by killing someone? It means they'll produce less carbon dioxide.

The UN is not (yet) a world government. There is a voluntary moratorium on geoengineering among the small number of governments that could afford to attempt such a thing, but that hardly qualifies as "UN regulations". In any case, small-scale experiments such as this, no matter how ill-conceived, are not going to have any global impact and so do not qualify as geoengineering.

I seem to be hearing the sound of UN flunkies screaming that this wasn't the way it was supposed to work? "AIIIIEEEEE!!! You can't just MANUFACTURE carbon credits!! That defeats the whole purpose of redistributing North American wealth!! Oh, wait, I wasn't supposed to tell anyone that. My bad."

If carbon credits werent involved, would the same people be in an uproar?

Well being from Ontario(Cdn), his comment about watermelons, is pretty much spot on. Especially in relation to the disastrous "green" projects that the now ex-pm of the province has going. $24 billion and counting at the cost to tax payers.

is the sound of people wanting to know what the outcome is, to know that we are not doing more harm than good, before we do something like this. Don't f*ck the world by accident or by ignorance. Preferably don't f*ck it at all.
I do not mind experimenting and learning, but something on this scale that has such huge potential ramifications, all on someone's belief rather than proven science, backed with long term studies - Nahh, that I do not like. Too much of it already in the world we live in. Let's learn from humanity's mistakes, please!

Every year we take 100 million tons of biomass from the oceans (mostly as pelagic fish, 70m tons). And each year, we dump 6 million tons of garbage in the oceans, 2 million tons of waste oil, and discharge about 450 cubic kilometres of waste water into rivers (about 450 billion tons, so even ppb chemicals release more than 100 tons).

no, we shouldn't care because they put in a nutrient that plankton like, on a scale that is miniscule (60x60 miles). there can be no long-term damage from an experiment on this scale. this is a viable solution to reducing carbon dioxide pollution in the atmosphere, and I'm glad someone had the balls to do it on a tiny scale so we can assess whether larger scale would in fact cause lasting harm. this was a good thing to do.

In France we have one such dead zone, consecutive to huge pork sewage dropped at sea.Enormous algae blooms result in beaches covered with thick rot algae (instead of sand), which sucks so much oxygen out of the air (or produces so much other gases, I don't remember exactly) that this kills animals passing by the beaches (wild boars, horses recently). Mind you, how this helps tourism there;-)Needless to say bathing is forbiden.Local politicians respect the numerous pork farmers, so nothing at

Every year we take 100 million tons of biomass from the oceans (mostly as pelagic fish, 70m tons). And each year, we dump 6 million tons of garbage in the oceans, 2 million tons of waste oil, and discharge about 450 cubic kilometres of waste water into rivers (about 450 billion tons, so even ppb chemicals release more than 100 tons).

But lets worry about 100 tons of iron sulphate dust.

Right, but it's some kind of tipping point, where a tiny bit (seen collectively) can cause huge changes. I remember reading that somewhere.

They produce oxygen as long as they are alive and near the surface. They sink to the deep waters after they died, and even if they still lived they would have a hard time to produce oxygen down in the darkness of the deep sea.

Take HIV. (Yes, that virus.) Attach to the rna strand an rna encoded copy of the gene for botuloid toxin, and a regulator gene to control expression. (Say, something that only permits activation during certain cyclical conditons, like say, menstration, or some other chemical trigger, so that it stays methylated and inactive in the host until that time.) Use the kind that is immune to the delta-CCR32 mutation, for maximum carnage.